


Gifts

by augen_auf



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-17
Updated: 2012-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-29 17:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/augen_auf/pseuds/augen_auf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a prompt on kmeme: "Danarius has elven ancestry. So I ask some kind write anon for a backstory. OP would love it if he has an elven magister as a parent."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gifts

A free elf gifted with magic is tempting bait for slavers.  
A free elf is most often a poor elf with no connections to secure an apprenticeship, nor money for mastering some basic skills and control.  
Morpheus has to learn by himself, setting his pillow on fire and covering the whole room in ice afterwards.

When the Elder decides to sell him, together with a few other orphans, he is not surprised.  
While Tevinter Alienages have few things to offer, and happy childhood isn’t one of them, survival skills lucklily are.

He makes it out of Minrathous, into a small sleepy town where a few outcast Magisters are drowning their misery in wine.

Morpheus looks beautiful and frail, and his coldest spells are shimmering in his ice-coloured eyes.  
Magistra Valeria is neither of those things, but she finds him as intoxicating as her liquor, and he consumes what’s left of her will and power faster then liquor does.

His initiation ceremony is a small event; in a town that poor he gets an old elven slave unfit for work, instead of ten full-blooded specimen that the ritual sacrifice would require in Minrathous.  
Valeria tentatively offers him a human slave instead, and he hits her in the face.

Magister Morpheus dislikes the smell of blood, as it violates the purity of his ice.  
It is filling the house and spilling over into the heated haze of the streets, as Valeria is leaving him, with nothing but their old house and her deceit as mementos.

It is incredibly ugly, with red blotched face and smell of blood and humming of magic under its wrinkly human skin.  
Morpheus idly wonders whether it can perform magic with his dead mother’s blood, and whether it would wish to.

He buys his first slave to attend to his son, and continues to spend his days in the library.  
Morpheus wishes he could have a child with it, for the old books have certainly received more of his passion that his dead wife ever had.  
Sometimes he also wishes his slave ran away.

She doesn’t, and she dares to stand in his way once, saying she doesn’t know what to call his son.  
She is holding the squirming bundle as she talks, and Morpheus sees his son’s eyes for the first time, silver and cold like his own.  
He still doesn’t know what to call him.

Steps are unsettling and distracting, and he catches the whiff of blood again when a human enters his sanctuary.  
Valeria’s bulky posture is a family trait, but otherwise there are only differences. Cruelty that hovers in the room like a cloud; disgust that Valerius doesn’t hide as he speaks to his elven brother-in-law; and fertility, where elderly and liquor-poisoned Valeria has managed to best her brother and the most expensive healers of Minrathous.

Morpheus gives them the slave as well, so when he falls dead among his books his body isn’t found until it crumbles to dust.  
His son was named Danarius, and for his first blood magic he drew on his father’s blood.


End file.
